Category Archives: Silly season

Sometimes you’ve just got to laugh at the antics of what’s left of the anti Hs2 campaign. It’s rare that I blog about them nowadays as there’s really nothing going on at a national level and very little at a local one either, but I couldn’t help but have a chuckle at this abject nonsense from today.

Apparently, two ‘action’ groups on the Phase 2b route (Trowell and Erewash) combined ‘forces’ to stage a march along part of the route of Hs2 in order to draw attention to the scheme. Instead, what they’ve drawn attention to is how few of them there are. Here’s the piece from the Nottingham Post, which helpfully provides a video and pictures (link). Don’t worry, the video doesn’t last long – this isn’t exactly on the scale of a Soviet military parade! I count around two dozen people (including babies) – as the photo illustrating the article demonstrates.

So, let’s crunch some numbers. The Erewash constituency contains 95,778 people. The MP is Maggie Throup, who has voted to build Hs2. Trowell is in the Broxtowe constituency of MP Anna Soubry, who’s also voted to build Hs2. It contains 97,032 people. That’s a combined total of 192,810 people – of which two dozen have turned out to protest about Hs2.

One freelance journalist got a little carried away and described the demonstration on Twitter thus;

I think Ms Snow may have confused the words force and farce…

There’s also a piece in the Derby Telegraph and a very optimistic interview with someone called Brent Poland, who claims they’re going to stop Hs2. How a few dozen people are going to do this without any political support (including from their own MPs) he never actually explains…